Concert, Anyone? Music Returns to Queens Tennis Stadium

Fans arriving at Forest Hills Stadium on Wednesday for a performance by Mumford & Sons, the first concert there since 1997.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

August 28, 2013

People wore terry-cloth sweatbands and headbands, and underfoot, the familiar outlines of a tennis court could be seen inside the stadium in Forest Hills, Queens. But on the court, girls in cutoffs shimmied. And the wristbands and headbands did not sop up sweat from athletes, but rather served as V.I.P. passes of sorts — yellow was for coveted floor space; blue meant banishment to the stands.

For the first time in more than a decade, music thundered from the Forest Hills Stadium, a 90-year-old concrete amphitheater so spare it looks as if it had been built in the era when the word “amphitheater” was coined.

The rock concert, the first of 19 to be held by 2017, is the result of an ambitious collaboration between a concert promoter and the property’s owner, the West Side Tennis Club, to rehabilitate the shabby stadium and bring music back to the court and return its fans to the stone stands.

The music and the fans had been kept out by neighbors upset by the noise and the disruption of concerts.

The stadium and the club long played host to the United States Open. The tournament moved to its new, glossier home in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in 1978. Smaller tournaments are still played at Forest Hills Stadium, though infrequently.

The stadium, a horseshoe of sandy arches that once hosted the likes of Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, had sat largely vacant since a Foo Fighters show in 1997, organizers say. New York City declared it structurally sound, and the stadium was rehabilitated at a cost of $1 million; the money was raised by Mike Luba, the concert’s promoter, as part of a planned multimillion-dollar overhaul.

As night fell, some ticket-holders were stuck in stairwells, unable for a time to get inside. The 17,000 tickets cost $70 and up.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Inside, fans swayed in the gloaming to rockers with rustic beards, awaiting the inaugural headliner, the British band Mumford & Sons, which sold out all 17,000 tickets (priced at $70 and up) in just a few hours.

Once the band took the stage, fans erupted in cheers as the music reverberated across the stadium. Outside, the reaction was mixed. During some of the concert, dozens of fans with tickets were stuck in the stairwells. Unable to get to their seats, some screamed and shoved. A few complained that the concert seemed to have been oversold, and that they wanted their money back.

Patrick Confrey, a spokesman for the club, apologized in a statement Wednesday night and offered refunds to those “who did not have an optimal experience.” The streets were snarled; the stadium has no designated parking. Customers were advised to take the Long Island Rail Road or the subway. Crowds poured from both, herded by crossing guards.

One guard declined to give his name, he said, because he had been specifically instructed not to speak to the press so as not to give a bad impression.

On the residential streets ringing the stadium, neighbors like Lou Guarino, 58, stood on the steps of their Tudor-style homes, in good spirits, taking pictures of the scene.

Mr. Guarino attended his first concert, by the Who, at the stadium when he was a teenager.

“I was on the other side of the people looking out their windows,” he said. “So I think I have to cut them all a break.”

Nearby, behind a police barricade, two other neighbors, Donna Paslavsky, 58 and Fran Stock, 73, had come out to hear the music over the stadium walls.

Standing in the street, they said, they had best seats in the house — free.